The Millrace

An Oral History Podcast

The Millrace is a podcast where we explore the past through the voices of people who lived it. Inspired by Hagley's 19th-century millrace—the water channel that powered the machinery on this site for over a hundred years—our podcast tells stories of enterprise and industry from Hagley's oral history collections.

For our inaugural series, we're stepping back in time 100 years to 1918. Using interviews from the Brandywine Oral History Project, we'll learn how the events of this explosive year changed the lives of the people who lived and worked along the Brandywine Creek. A new episode will air every other Friday, starting on August 31, 2018.

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Series 1

The People

The Brandywine Oral History collection includes interviews with nearly 200 people. We've focused in on a handful of them. Their stories reveal how the events of 1918 and its aftermath—war, disease, explosions, and other perils—shaped the daily lives of Americans living in this time of rapid change.

When the First World War broke out, Helen Edwards was finishing up a business school course and starting a job as a secretary in an office in downtown Wilmington. But she soon discovered she didn't much like the work. When the U.S. entered the war in 1918, she had a chance to try something that otherwise would have been out-of-bounds: a factory job making explosives in the DuPont powderyards. She and a friend signed up as soon as they got the chance, out of a desire not only to contribute to the war effort but also to be more than an office girl. Eager to draw on this new female labor pool, DuPont went so far as to provide free transportation by bus from Wilmington's Rodney Square out to the Brandywine Works. The company also gave the women distinctive coveralls that earned them the nickname "bloomer girls."

Helen soon came to understand the dangers of her new job. When an explosion rocked the yards, it tore the heavy machinery she worked with out of the floor, knocked her to the ground, and sent pieces of wood flying through the air. Unfazed, she stood right up and grabbed a hose to start fighting the fire she saw coming down the production line toward her station. When the influenza epidemic hit, she kept herself well with a home remedy suggested by her father: drinking a glass of wine before every shift.

In spite of the dangers, Helen and her fellow bloomer girls had fond memories of their time as factory workers. They developed great friendships, and the camaraderie sometimes extended into mischief. One of her friends decided to take a ride down one of the chutes in the factory—and ended up getting stuck! When the war ended, Helen and her coworkers dropped what they were doing and joined the crowds celebrating downtown. Without even putting on their hats and coats to keep them warm on the cold November day, they clung to the bus and sang and cheered with the rest of the city. Though the war had meant opportunity for them, they were also relieved when it was over.

The defacto poet laureate of the Brandywine Works, Edward Cheney grew up in Squirrel Run, a prodominantly Irish and Italian workers' village at the southern end of the factory. His father worked in the powderyards, and he joined the company as well, following DuPont as it expanded its production around the country.

The war meant new opportunities for Edward and his family, and a chance to live in places beyond his home village. He helped DuPont build some of the new facilities it constructed to meet the wartime demand for explosives, and moved up the management chain as a result. He left DuPont briefly after the war to work selling stock for a bank, but returned in less than a year, disappointed by the incredibly long hours he had to put in, with a growing family at home.

Though he worked for a time in Hopewell, Virginia, and eventually settled with his wife and family in New Jersey, where he worked at DuPont's Carney's Point facility, Edward remained deeply attached to the place of his birth and childhood. He wrote many poems commemorating the events and recollections of his life, from childhood memories of the annual Fourth of July celebrations in the workers' villages, to his retirement from Carney's Point, to taking his children back to see his old stomping grounds, and an elegy for the village where he was born.

A bright and ambitious young woman, Mary Hazzard Collins had not had the opportunities to match her abilities. As an African-American woman, her job prospects were essentially limited to domestic service, and when the U.S. entered World War I, she was taking care of other families' children.

When a friend told her they were hiring out at the powderyards, Mary jumped at the chance. But her mother, worried about the dangers of a job making explosives, was not so eager. Mary eventually convinced her to relent, but when an explosion hit, her mother and aunt were distraught. It was an uphill battle, both at home and on the job, for Mary to succeed.

And succeed she did. Mary quickly became a foreman in the shipping yard, coordinating the transportation of powder and explosives to their final destinations, keeping careful track of which loads went on which cars, and collecting timeslips from male workers. When the end of the war meant an end to her position, she stuck with the company and her upward track, landing a job as an elevator operator in the DuPont headquarters downtown. Eventually, she was promoted to elevator starter—essentially, the dispatcher who coordinated all the elevator operators. While there were still limits to how far she could rise, such a respectable job represented an important step for Mary towards independence.

As a college student in agriculture at the University of Delaware, Harvey Fell got a job as a wagon driver on the DuPont company farm. When the war broke out, he and several other teamsters got brought over to the powderyards to haul explosives around the property. The work was dangerous, but the pay was hard to turn down. He continued to work hauling powder until the war was at an end.

Harvey went on to complete not only his undergraduate work but also a veterinary degree. He practiced his trade throughout the Brandywine Valley, even tending to the animals owned by the du Pont family. But after the war ended in 1919 and the powderyards closed in 1921, he saw how difficult it was for the men and women who had lived in the workers' villages to keep afloat. With the mills gone, and the little villages giving way to large estates, what were these families to do?

Harvey was able to stay, but many of the people he had gotten to know well moved on to other opportunities, leaving the Brandywine villages as quiet as the powderyards.

Support for The Millrace comes from Margaret L. Laird, Peter Silvia, the Brookeville Fund, and contributors to the Mary Laird Silvia Oral History Fund.